[Whiteman is a Canadian bibliographer and poet whose writings include Leonard Cohen: An Annotated Bibliography (1980) and En avoir fini avec le corps seul (1987). In the following unfavorable review, Whiteman contends that WSW (West South West) fails to include the lyrical qualities and the "public concerns of Mouré's earlier writings."]

Erin Mouré's WSW (West South West) is a difficult book, full of a kind of writing that is patently informed by theory and yet so close to the body as sometimes barely to articulate any subject. Subject, story and description are evidently all under suspicion as ostensible instances of betrayal:

[…] The description itself, even if questioned, portrays the arrogance of the author. In all claims to the story, there is muteness. The writer as witness, speaking the stories, is a lie, a liberal bourgeois lie. Because the speech is the writer's speech, and each word of the writer robs the witnessed of their own voice, muting them.

Certainly I disagree profoundly with such a take on what might possibly be said, though my or anyone's disagreement is scarcely an issue here. But this rejection of point of view has far-reaching effects on Mouré's language; with it comes a reduction to sensual impression, as she says quite openly:

[…] The truest things, if spoken here, would sound like nonsense. So the woman running to the car is preemptively sufficient, ducking the sky's water

Clicking the car door open

And yet, curiously, that resistance to the judgements and understandings of the ego, the mind, result in a language that can be puzzling, even impenetrable at times. Body writing predicates its own obscurities, "A world where 'this,' & 'this' / come together" by accident and without explication, providing a poetry of unmediated registration, or almost. Mouré's risk, then, is that the voicing of what is private (and WSW is a far more private book than Furious was) will give the reader no ingress at all. In-jokes ("Neurasthenic glamour is everywhere, wobbling on / 'dude' knees") and baited personal reference ("The woman opens the car door, brown car / Valiant they say. / Now everyone in the know knows whose car / I'm talking of") scarcely add to a text that, for all its being informed by desire, is highly resistant to any readerly enticement. Perhaps in Mouré's next collection she will be able to combine the writing from inside of this book with the lyrical and public concerns of her earlier writing.